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The death of Ozzy Osbourne and the Scopes Monkey Trial · The Daily Article

• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's Wednesday, July the twenty-third, twenty-twenty-five.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Daily Article podcast from Denison Forum.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Chris Elkins, narrating today's Daily article, written by Denison Forum CEO Dr. Jim Denison.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ozzy Osborn died yesterday at the age of seventy-six.
• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was especially famous or infamous for biting the head off a dead bat during a concert in Des Moines.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is unsurprising.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Associated Press calls him, quote, the gloomy, demon invoking lead singer of his band, tellingly titled Black Sabbath, and the drug and alcohol ravaged ID of heavy metal.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: His bands, eponomously titled First Album, was released in nineteen seventy and sold nearly five million albums, Black Sabbath sold more than seventy five million albums in total.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Osborne was known as the Prince of Darkness, a term employed in John Milton's Paradise Lost.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: to refer to Satan as the embodiment of evil, to understand the cultural insight Osborn's career illustrates, ask yourself whether his music, celebrating themes of horror, doom, paranoia, drug abuse, and the occult would have been popular or even possible twenty years earlier.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, let's turn to our second news item.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Monday was the one hundredth anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trail conclusion.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: At issue was Tennessee's law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The high school teacher being prosecuted, John T. Scopes was found guilty and fined one hundred dollars, although the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the technicality.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: while upholding the law against evolution as constitutional.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: In many ways, the cultural conflict revealed by the trial has been exacerbated for many by the normalization of evolutionary theory that it produced.
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: From then until now, battles over abortion, sexual liberation, and LGBTQ ideology
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: have been one resoundingly by their proponents.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even the Supreme Court's decision overturning Rovi Wade did not lower the number of abortions in America.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is tragically illogical.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: If human life is the coincidental product of chaotic evolutionary forces, there are no external or objective authorities by which to value or protect it.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mothers are then free to abort their babies stating, my body, my choice.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: People are free to have sex with anyone who consents, believing if it feels good, do it.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marriage is whatever we define it to be, stating love is love.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frederick Nietzsche accused atheists of his day of having no idea of the significance of their atheism.
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: As historian Carl Truman notes, quote, killing God, Nietzsche points out, requires that his assassins themselves rise to the challenge of being gods of becoming those who create meaning and value.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In quote, you don't have to listen to the nihilism of a black Sabbath song to know how this is working out for us.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I fear that American religion has been partly to blame for the moral trajectory of American society, especially in recent years.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Rome, before Rome, the legends that shaped the Romans, Oxford historian Philip Matizack reports, the Romans felt that their gods helped those who helped themselves.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: In quote, Benjamin Franklin would popularize their sentiment.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our declaration of independence asserts that we have the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: George Washington later identified religion and morality as great pillars of human happiness.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both statements are true, of course, but when human happiness becomes our purpose, religion becomes merely a means to this end.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Across American history, religious fervor has risen in times of need and fallen in times of prosperity.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is known as the existential insecurity theory.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Sunday after nine-eleven, the twenty-two-hundred-seat sanctuary of the church I pastored in Dallas was packed for both services.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two Sundays later, when it had become clear that the horrific attacks were not part of a sustained assault on our country, attendance returned to normal.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: A long time children's Sunday school teacher told my wife that when she began teaching years ago, parents would pick up their children and ask, what did you learn?
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now they ask, did you have a good time?
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Bible by contrast declares that God is not a means to our ends.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: To the contrary, he testifies an Isaiah forty-three verse seven that we are
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: created for His glory, and warns in Isaiah forty-eight, verse eleven, my glory I will not give to another.
• 5:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In first Corinthians ten, verse thirty one, we are commanded, whatever you do do all to the glory of God.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Does this make God a divine egotist?
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The opposite is true.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He knows that seeking the glory of anything or anyone, especially ourselves, rather than his glory, is idolatry.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he knows that no idol can do what his omnipotence can do in our lives and world.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Listen to the prophet in Jeremiah ten verses fourteen through sixteen.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: For his images are false, and there is no breath in them.
• 6:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are worthless, a work of delusion.
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the time of their punishment, they shall perish.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not like these is he who is the portion of Jacob, for he is the one who formed all things.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Consequently, we read in Psalm thirty two, verse ten, many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: A culture that would embrace Aussie Osborne's occultic idolatry desperately needs such steadfast love today.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So know that, Darwin to the contrary, you are here on purpose or a purpose.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: God created you to be conformed to the image of his son, according to Romans eight, verse twenty nine,
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's our role stated in second Corinthians three verse eighteen, beholding the glory of the Lord, we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The more we seek to glorify Jesus, the more we become like Jesus.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the more we become like Jesus, the more the light of Jesus shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it, stated in John one verse five.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: St.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bridget, patron saint of Europe, died on this day in thirteenth seventy-three.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the age of seven, she had mystical visions of the crucified Christ.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: These visions drove her to compassion for others, mirroring the compassion of her Savior.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: She once heard her Lord say, you ought to be like a person who lets go and like one who gathers.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: You should let go of the riches and gather virtues.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let go of what will pass and gather eternal things.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let go of visible things and gather invisible.
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In return for the possession of goods, I will give you myself, the giver and creator of all things, in quote, what will you let go to glorify Jesus today?